Traffic no longer used in search??

The best camping I ever came across was one that paid out every 5 minutes. I was on it when something went wrong with the sim. I crashed and nobody couldn't get back into the sim, but the camping system kept on paying me - every 5 minutes. Later, I turned the computer off and went to bed - but the system kept on paying me - every 5 minutes. It was still paying me every 5 minutes when I got up the next day.

It was eventually fixed and it stopped paying me, but it was a very good camping system

;0 yeah that's it... i couldn't put my finger on it right off the bat. ;0 what if it was the number of unique transactions per day only though, something like that?

i have been in SL for over 2 years now, and i have ALWAYS camped. i have bought land, spent more $ on buying other people's merchandise than i can even try to remember (for this account and almost EVERY alt), had 3 paying memberships, and cashed out.

once upon a time i was embarrassed to admit that i camped, and i said i bought lindens. that was an outright lie. i have never ever ever put one single, solitary dime into SL. i use money from SL to pay for SL.

if SL cannot support itself for me, i will not input $$ into it. the end. some people thumb there noses at campers, but i think it's a far bigger laugh on them to be able to say that i've been floating for free all this time, and nothing has come out of my pockets. in fact, $ has gone IN TO my pockets. i think i am clever and mock those who laugh at me - while they or their neighbors pay my tier and membership fees so i can play for free.

chumps!

that was a little unethical, but i guess it was the owner's fault for not getting the settings right. and so - where was that? LOL

It does not matter what LindenLabs does, it will still be gamed. Any incoming traffic toa sim would need to be thrown into the metrics to get a number one.

What about picks machines promising winnings. incoming. groups, incoming, event abuse, incoming, bot camping and bot abuse, incoming, prim abuse naming conventions on sims.
parceling islands with abuse to each parcel in the middle of an siland. incoming.

Bits are easy. place em and they sit and gather traffic. its the invisible things that can be abused. I know the search and how it works because i study it. I dont know its exact methods yet, but i know enough to rank me and anyone i care to tell. and bots and camping are probably the last thing i would recomend.

Wow, a generation brought up on camping.

An argument presented for camping is that it is a way for some merchants to give L$ to other merchants via middlemen (campers).
If no camping then economy = doomed!!
So we need an alternative way for merchants to give L$ to other merchants.

They could give it all to me, and I would redistribute it. That would work!
I could just hand it out at random.
I could have a bunch of bots that TP all over the grid and pay nearby avatars.
My bots would need a very stylish superheroine/Mrs Claus costume - or maybe something like the Tooth Fairy.
I like this idea! Everybody send me L$. OK?

I camped - once. The fifteen Lindens I "earned" was worth neither my time nor my effort. Since then, I have managed to get along in SL just fine without having to invest a single penny into the game or having to resort to camping.

For me, it's simple math: I can either spend two hours camping and get maybe six Lindens - which isn't doing me or the economy any good at all; or I can dance for two hours and get maybe 600 Lindens.

Amen to that.

When I log in, I'm sending you some L$. (Just make sure your bots hang out at Ninbriana to give out extra ca$h to the visitors ok? *wink wink*)

Oh snap, i just gamed Sling!

deja vu
and he still stole half my estate.

LOL

Sounds like a dream system for campers

I found a good camping system recently that payed a one off payment of 5L for 5mins to sit through an introduction, the system was being created from scratch to provide various camping tasks which required user interaction, payment would increase as involvement increased.

I couldn't do anything to stop it and the owner didn't ask for it back.

I like the idea of traffic based search, more than L$, I think though that the traffic should be registered as the number of different avatars hitting a site, as this takes away the point in having a bot sat hovering around 24/7 or a camper sat offline for hours on end.

Another thing I would love to see is banning of bots, they are a pet hate of mine.
They are mostly a nuisance to everyone but their individual owners.
One sits 24/7 in the linden ocean beside my island, I cannot even think why a bot would sit there it is not to build up traffic, I couldn't even see it in world just on the map as a green dot, the other day one was sat in the sandbox, which must be a little creepy for new users, so I sent it packing.
Most big land sellers have them to swoop in and purchase any bargain plots appearing in seconds of listing, making landcosts completely biased against most normal users.


I hope the Lindens continue to use traffic values for search, but based on the number of different avatars that hit a location per day or week, rather than the time spent by avatars in a location.
Although I can see it may be required that an avatar should remain in a location for say at least one minute before it registers as traffic.

Of course many people will probably attempt to generate an army of alts to boost their traffic figures but this could be limited to a maximum figure say 10 by LL quite easily.

And there you have one big problem with the idea. We've discussed the traffic rankings so much in this forum, and the only realistic thing to do is get rid of traffic rankings altogether.

One approach to the traffic problem is to ask yourself which metric is valuable and effective but also not damaging to the grid or it's users when it is inevitably gamed.

By that approach your suggestion of only counting unique visitors would not be effective because Phil Deakins and presumably everyone else will immediately make as many alts as they can, possibly sharing with each other and just have them logging in and out all day long. Presumably this would be just as bad for grid performance as the current one.

This is also why I like the All search so much. Sure it's heavily gamed and some of the top results probably don't deserve to be there but at least when you pay for picks or keyword spam or whatever else people do it doesn't make my life miserable when I'm just trying to fly from one place to another.

One of the most important unknowns here is just how adept LL is at discovering alts reliably and very efficiently. If they can do that, there's some hope for Traffic or some other proxy metric for "popularity"*--and otherwise, it's simply not ever going to work.

And there's a risk that a new, better-than-Traffic metric could break the grid even worse than it is now. A couple of examples:

Say we change Traffic so it depends somehow on number of unique visitors--such that a bot can't just hang out for hours, racking up Traffic points. One could argue that such an approach is closer to "popularity" and less easily gamed. The problem is that it still *can* be gamed--but at much greater cost to grid resources, because the agents (bots or campers) that are inflating the Traffic scores would now be regularly teleporting all over, every time whacking each origin and destination sim and the LL-internal network resources. Those boxes of silent, low-bandwidth bots would suddenly become waystations in a costly traffic-for-hire tour.

Or say we change it so it's somehow dependent on L$s spent. Well, that's trivial to game with bots, but worse, the "gaming" hits SL back-end services at what's currently their point of worst vulnerability: central DB transactions. And the fix for this vulnerability has proven exceptionally difficult--they've been working on it for years now, including using the heaviest hardware they can find. This idea would simply halt in-world business until abandoned.

Related to the alt-detectability unknown is uncertainty about bot-detectability. I believe that right now, libsecondlife bots would be easily detected--but that's only because there's never been any particular reason to keep them from being detected. Within hours of LL restricting bots in any way, there will be a new bot version that defeats whatever they're using to detect them. This includes using CAPCHAs: simply pay newbies a couple L$s to solve a CAPCHAs with an in-world system fashioned after Amazon's Mechanical Turk. But really it's going to be true of any bot-detection scheme: it's not just an escalating battle, it's one in which the bots will easily win each skirmish quickly. The end result will only be a new profitable business: automated bot version control.

*If* LL can very efficiently and reliably detect alts, however, then bots will fall with the same stroke, so that's really the serious unknown, at least to me.

________
*I have serious technical qualms about any form of "popularity" for Search ranking; I've described this before and no doubt will again, but I'll spare folks that rant here. For now, I'll just pretend that a valid, ungamed popularity metric would be a good thing.

I camped back when they still had the Dev Incentives going on. Gave me enough of a boost with the stipend that I got my shop up, running and self-supporting. I figured if people were willing to pay me to sit and do nothing, then I was going to take advantage of it.

As a shop owner now, I prefer lucky chairs to drum up a little traffic. And I will be keeping them even if LL does away with traffic because they are a great combination of contest and demo system. Plus, they encourage those that actually like the one they win to look around at the rest.

Edit: I wonder if LL would consider "removing" the traffic numbers from the Places search? Not make it go bye-bye, just make it unlisted. What do you think would happen?

This has always been my favourite suggestion, leave everything exacty as it is and just remove the Place tab altogether. Would take five minutes of development time and would immediately make traffic bots pointless. They might stick around for a while in order to help on the All search but people will quickly realise it hardly makes a difference there.

Note the top search result for "garden" isn't a garden at all - they simply have that keyword in their advert, and the traffic number bumps them to the top.

Wow that looks like it is about 500 bots worth of traffic just from that screen shot alone!!

This is why Search Places is useless and should be totally eliminated. Try searching in All for garden, the results are actually relevant.

Twasn't suggesting remove the Places search.. just the ability to see the numbers. Kind of a first step in removing traffic completely. I can see at least mild chaos, because the next highest ranked in the search would have NO idea what number they'd need to be the highest. Which might mean, they'd create MORE bots, making the numbers on the front page look even "better."

Assuming that you also mean removing the traffic figure from the About Land box (otherwise there'd be no point in removing the numbers from the Places tab):- The problem with that idea is that everyone would know that traffic still decides the rankings, and it wouldn't put any dent in traffic bot useage. It could even increase it as people don't know how far they need to go to move up a bit. As it is now, we know whether or not we can reach the traffic of the one above us. If we can't, we don't even try. But without the numbers, we could think that the next one up may not be far ahead of us, and add another bot or two, etc.

That's what makes the Places tab search such a crap search. With or without traffic bots, that will happen.